Opening a shop & LSL for an experienced coder?

Hi,

I'm planning to open up a shop in due time, once I've actually created enough content to have something to sell.

I'm a professional programmer, so LSL shouldn't be a problem except for learning the API and concepts of SL.


I have a few questions, as to save some time:

1. Are there good tutorials on LSL for experienced coders? I'd rather not wade through hundreds of pages of explanations on programming concepts I'm already familiar with. Where can I learn about the concepts specific to SL, and is there a good browsable API reference somewhere?

2. Once I do get around to building my shop, is it wiser to use some existing script, or should I implement my own? The shops I've been to so far seem to have static 1 clickable poster per item on sale -approaches. Could one perhaps implement some kind of browsable approach with a HUD or something? It seems sort of weird limiting yourself to a bunch of click-to-buy-this -posters in a virtual world?

3. Finally, are there any especially good shops or scripts I should check out?

Thanks in advance,
Marquis

1 lslwiki.net

2 most of the poster shops are not setup by scripters, and they are ez, they take forever to load that 88mb of textures but thats a different story, but also alot of users prefer to be able to walk in, load up and see everything vs muddling tru a vendor... you have to find your balance for your products

as far as more than static posters, you can go as far as you want, one of the texture systems i whipped up was a dynamic pushbutton system, that stood in world, sorta like a pseudo html browser or catalog system, with a central server, networked updating , all the bells

3 tons, do i know where they are, not atm sorry

I did some more research, and it seems like Apotheus Silverman's multi-item vendor script is what I want. Anyone have any other good tips?

Thanks for the tips, Osgeld.

I probably don't want to go with the huge shop, lots-o-pics approach. Especially since a large piece of land quickly becomes expensive.

I'm a professional web developer, so setting up a site for more in-depth info on each article is relatively trivial. I've seen you can trigger web page loads in your browser through SL, is this something SL residents would object to, or is a well done site a welcome addition for speedy searching trough the catalog? I guess one could set up multiple vendors, one per category, that way the site would complement the shop nicely.

Speaking as one with an older machine: it's either SL or a browser. If both, it's time for coffee, danish, dog-walking.... On the other hand, I have purchased stuff on SLX or SLB (forget which, maybe both) for in-world delivery when TP was exceptionally b0rked. It's certainly easy enough to script links to the web and slurls back to world, and even the in-world delivery seems simple enough, but the current lack of "experience integration" really doesn't make it all that appealing (to me anyway). The "html on a prim" thing seems targeted to coincide with Godot's appearance but there is talk of SL-in-browser.

Thanks for the info. I'm planning to try and get things up and running during the next six months, (heavy RL obligations -> little free time,) so I'm going to take it slow and see what works. I have noticed that SL eats memory like crazy, so running a browser alongside it might indeed be a bad idea.

If you'd like to see some non-static vendors, visit one of my stores. I created a couple of them that are fairly non-standard, including the scripts. Send me an IM in-world if you'd like a LM to them.

LSL is also pretty easy to deal with when you are used to things like PHP, C++, and Java implementations. The API is a bit difficult to odeal with sometimes, as there are a lot of limits to it, but lslwiki.net is a great place to find information about every function, event, and control in the game.